Introduction to User Experience Principles and Processes (Bonus Material)
Basic Method of UX Research
Observe
Inspect
Ask
Focus Group
Diary Studies
Interview & Survey
Experience Sampling
Conversations with stakeholder to understand aspects of their experience
Questions distributed to lots of people to elicit attitudes, behaviours and characteristics
Usage Analytics
Video Analysis
User Testing
Social Media Mining
Observe When...
Walkthrough
Comparative Analysis
Guideline-based
Combo: Watch & Ask
Contextual Interviews
Artifact based methods
User's Testing
Ash when...
Observation infeasible (infrequent, long and private etc)
Values and motivation are the keys (not easy to find out why people are doing certain things)
(Surveys) Large number and high certainty are needed eg. statiscal modelling
Ethnographic Observations
Process and communication are important (how communication plays a part)
(Analytics) Large numbers amd high certainty are needed
Self-report will miss information (eg. memory, tacit knowledge) things that will not be able to tell in survey
Inspect when...
You have a product to inspect eg. prototype - guideline based inspection and walkthrough
When interacting with users is too expensive and cumbersome
Iterative Design
Design
Build
Access
Steps
- Low-fidelity prototype (after a few rounds)
- Heuristic evaluation ; guideline-based inspection (after a few rounds)
- Comparative Analysis (after the 1st round)
- Hi-fidelity user testing (put the product infront of user and hear their feedback)
- Observations
- Analytics; set up analytics to track and see how people are actually using the product, so that we can use the information to improve our product in the next cycle
- Interviews
Watching people engage in activities to understand how they go about them
Hanging around the environment, to know how user go about them
Watching people perform scripted tasks to see if system supports them
Watching people interacting with prototype
Employ web/mobile analytics to understand the pattern of usage
comparing a system design against known best practices to find possible flaws
stepping through the interaction sequence from the "user view" to find probable breakdown
systematically comparing a design with similar design to identify strength and weaknesses
Task observation is typically accompanied by interviews (ask what works and why?)
Ask question while observing "natural" activities take place (Ask them why they are doing what they do)